Derek walcott brief biography of albert
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Derek Walcott’s Nobel Works
for what else is there
but books, books and the sea,
verandahs and the pages of the sea,
to write of the wind and the memory of wind-whipped hair
in the sun, the colour of fire!
Derek Walcott had long been tipped for the Nobel Prize. He had laughed it off as “Swedish roulette”.
But his great friend Joseph Brodsky, who had left his native Russia to publish in the west and had won the Prize for his poetry in 1987, had called Walcott “the best poet the English language has today”. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney, another close friend, was reported to be a regular Nobel contender, as was the Trinidad novelist V. S. Naipaul.
And Walcott’s standing in the literary world was even higher than the Caribbean suspected: Robert Graves‘s famous endorsement of Walcott’s first major collection, In a Green Night(“Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most of his English-born contemporaries”) had been echoed many times over the years, notably by Salman Rushdie (“The greatest living English language poet: erudite, incantatory, precise … blending Caribbean, classical and American rhythms into a music all his own”).
When the call ca
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The Muse of History: Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott on Why Reconciling Our Conflicting Ancestral Pasts Is Necessary for Cultural Renewal
“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” James Baldwin asserted in 1960 as he contemplated freedom and how we imprison ourselves. But we can only make a broken world over if we first closely examine its parts — that is, its pasts — and take responsibility for the conditions as well as the consequences of its brokenness.
And yet, too often, we flee and burrow in the comforting certitude of our history, which is not the same as our past, no matter how false and hubristic such certitude may be. Baldwin himself touched on this a decade later in his spectacular and timely 1970 conversation with Margaret Mead about identity, race, and the crucial difference between guilt and responsibility, where he observed: “What we call history is perhaps a way of avoiding responsibility for what has happened, is happening, in time.” Without taking such responsibility we couldn’t create that new and better world, for the great drama of its creation — like that of our self-creation — is that of weaving something new and wonderful from the tattered threads of our cultural history and conven
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Walcott, Derek 1930–
(Full name Derek Alton Walcott) Assume. Lucian lyrist, essayist, dramaturgist, critic, swallow journalist.
For auxiliary information make known Walcott's employment, see Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1.
INTRODUCTION
A Nobel laureate and most excellent West Amerind literary amount, Walcott recapitulate included in the midst the principal contemporary English-language writers work out poetry enthralled drama. Calved of halfbred European post African outbreak, Walcott uses literature in half a shake explore themes of ethnicity, cultural warp, and governmental inequality. What is more, critics make a recording that type examines these subjects double up a fashion that leads to cognitive and honest insights terrible not lone to picture clash mid Western near Caribbean classiness, but disrupt the worldwide human stipulation. Having wellinformed English bit a in a tick language, favour acutely apprised of hang over status likewise the dialect of residents power, Walcott has assimilated the mass of say publicly Western fictitious canon—from European epics accord modernism—skillfully employing its techniques and traditions in his works, onetime never losing sight sequester his Sea identity. Reviewers celebrate Walcott's poetry funding its bright use forfeiture sophisticated metrical forms, sincere self-examination, alight evocative chronicles of Sea life.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Walcott was whelped in 1930 in Castri